In the past month, some Google searches have been revealing an option to comparison-shop vacation rentals.
In our checks Tuesday, we could find vacation rental filters for Barcelona, Berlin, Bordeaux, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Madrid, Munich, Milan, Naples, Nice, Nuremberg, Paris, Palermo, Porto, Reims, Rome, Seville, and Venice.
The results are limited to a small subset of alternative lodging inventory similar to traditional vacation rentals. Collectively we counted about 7,000 property listings. That is a mere smattering of the potential rental listings in Europe.
Our search Tuesday of google.com and google.co.uk for the term “hotels in Paris” unveiled the option to filter the results by choosing “vacation rental” from a drop-down menu for “accommodation type.”
In the Paris example, applying that filter turned up only 420 apartments — a sliver of the more than 50,000 available for rent in that city according to short-term rental leader Airbnb.
Doing a search on a straightforward phrase like “vacation rentals in Paris” didn’t turn up the feature. Only searching for a phrase like “hotels in Paris” cued the search box to appear.
Google is doing the test in multiple markets, too. A search on French site google.fr for “hôtel à Paris” found similar results. A search on German site google.de found results for vacation rentals, or Ferienwohnungen, too.
It is a cross-device test, too. We saw the option to have vacation rental filters on tablets and smartphones when running searches on Google in the U.S., UK, Germany, and France.
Booking.com is the biggest vacation rental player to have listings in the tool. It is providing the bulk of the content. But only a handful of its 753,465 vacation rental listings is being pulled into Google’s system today.
To be sure, there were a few listings from other players, like Expedia Inc.-owned Hotels.com.
Yet we found none from the dedicated vacation rental platforms of Airbnb, FlipKey, HomeAway, or Tujia.
Caveats aside, the test is a milestone for Google. It is the first time we’ve seen the search giant attempt to add vacation rentals as a lodging category alongside hotels.
